High-resolution angle-of-arrival measurement of the mobile radio channel

The accurate planning of microcellular mobile radio networks requires a thorough understanding of the mechanisms that govern radio wave propagation in urban environments. Combined measurements of time delays and angles-of-arrival (AoAs), both in azimuth and elevation, of individual multipath contributions are expected to he very helpful in the validation and improvement of existing ray-tracing propagation models. To this end, we have applied the uniform circular array (UCA)-MUSIC angular superresolution algorithm to complex impulse response measurement data obtained from a synthetic uniform circular array. Beamspace processing and forward/backward averaging were applied to cope with strongly correlated signals. The presented experimental results show that our approach is capable of identifying the dominant multipaths in actual mobile propagation environments.